Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:59bb0495db1d3ebc2c43c1461279557d

Performance of family history-based colorectal cancer screening criteria by race and age at diagnosis in the Disparities and Cancer Epidemiology (DANCE) study

Authors:

Purrington ↗Martin ↗Wenzlaff ↗A. S ↗Ruterbusch ↗J. J ↗Patil ↗Pandolfi ↗S. S ↗Samayoa ↗Schwartz ↗A. G ↗…

Importance: Family history (FH) and age are the primary criteria employed for early colorectal cancer (CRC) risk stratification. We evaluated how well these criteria identify individuals diagnosed with CRC across age and racial groups. Objective: To evaluate the performance of FH and age based screening criteria for identifying individuals with CRC, with attention to differences by race and age at diagnosis. Design, Setting, and Participants: This case control and case only analysis used data from the Disparities and Cancer Epidemiology (DANCE) cohort, a population based study of invasive CRC cases diagnosed from 2013 to 2022, recruited through the Metropolitan Detroit Cancer Surveillance System and the Louisiana Tumor Registry. Analyses included 1,158 non-Hispanic Black (NHB) and non-Hispanic White (NHW) CRC cases and 1,434 cancer-free controls from the Inflammation Health and Lung Epidemiology (INHALE) study, enrolled from the same Detroit catchment area. Data were analyzed in 2025. Exposures: Self reported cancer FH among first-degree (FD) relatives and grandparents, summarized into three FH-based screening criteria: at least one FD relative with CRC (colon early-screening criterion), any FH of Lynch syndrome related cancers, and meeting NCCN criteria for Lynch syndrome genetic testing. Main Outcomes and Measures: Proportion of cases meeting each FH based screening criterion stratified by race and age at diagnosis (

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17266

SkillChain-Gym: A Benchmark for Reskilling-Aware Production-Inventory Control under Disruptions

Authors:

Carlos Eduardo Sanoja ↗

arXiv:2606.17266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production planning increasingly has to treat workforce capability as a decision variable: certifications lapse when skills are not maintained, new products require skills the current workforce does not hold, and reskilling competes for the same worker hours needed for production. Existing operations benchmarks usually treat labor as exogenous, while workforce-planning models with skills and learning are rarely released as reusable testbeds. We introduce SkillChain-Gym, a benchmark specification for reskilling-aware production-inventory control: a single-site environment with stylized worker skill-state dynamics, hard threshold certification, forgetting, and capacity-consuming training actions constrained by the same per-worker time budget as production. The benchmark includes seed-controlled disruption scenarios, three feasibility modes with projection diagnostics, deterministic replay, and metrics covering operations, resilience, capability growth, and training-access distribution. We evaluate production-only, reactive adaptive, water-filling adaptive, and static-insurance policies with budget variants over 60-shift horizons with paired statistical tests. The results are regime-dependent rather than a ranking. Training-capable policies dominate the production-only baseline, and maintenance training is necessary under forgetting even without disruptions. Among training-capable classes, adaptive training helps when bottlenecks are visible in the forecast, while a lean static cross-training plan, a deliberately favorable comparator whose structure encodes relevant skill contingencies, acts as strong insurance under surprise shocks and absenteeism. Capacity slack and the forgetting rate govern the boundary between these regimes. No policy class dominates across regimes, motivating forecast-driven controllers that decide when to buy skill insurance and when to react.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17950

Plug-and-Adapt: Multimodal Coreference Resolution at First Sight with a Pretrained Alignment Model

Authors:

Jinghan Wu ↗Jing Li ↗Ivor W. Tsang ↗Xuetao Zhang ↗

Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains. However, existing Multi-modal Coreference Resolution (MCR) methods require training with (partially) annotated data from the target dataset before they can be applied, preventing their direct usability and raising concerns about generalization. While Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) with billions of parameters offer promising zero-shot capabilities, they remain largely inaccessible. Their massive size limits deployability, and many are only accessible through paid APIs. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-adapt method that strategically adapts a carefully pre-trained alignment model for immediate use in MCR tasks, designed to eliminate the need for training on scarce benchmark datasets or relying on resource-intensive VLLMs. Specifically, we first pre-train a fine-grained alignment model between textual and visual contextual information using vision-language alignment datasets. We then repurpose the alignment model to MCR through similarity aggregation by fusing visual and categorical cues with evidence theory, thereby enhancing effectiveness. Experiments on the Coreference Image Narratives (CIN) benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 5.31\% and 2.12\% improvement in CoNLL F1 over SOTA dedicated methods and popular VLLMs, respectively. We further evaluate our method on a masked CIN dataset for robustness testing and on a specially constructed VCR-MCR dataset for generalization assessment, with results confirming both capabilities.

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04.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2504.05336

Quantum Adaptive Self-Attention for Quantum Transformer Models

Authors:

Chi-Sheng Chen ↗En-Jui Kuo ↗

arXiv:2504.05336v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A recurring weakness in quantum machine learning (QML) is that reported ``quantum advantages'' are seldom tested against a capacity-matched classical control, leaving it unclear whether a gain comes from the quantum substrate or from the architectural change that accompanies it. Our primary contribution is methodological: a protocol for attributing such gains honestly – a capacity-matched classical bottleneck of identical parameter budget, transparent reporting of where quantum does not help, and validation on real quantum hardware – which we develop and apply through a concrete case study. That case study is Quantum Adaptive Self-Attention (QASA), a hybrid Transformer that replaces the value projection of a single encoder layer with a 36-parameter parameterized quantum circuit (PQC), keeping all other layers classical. Across nine synthetic benchmarks and the real-world ETTh1 dataset, QASA improves on a full-capacity classical Transformer for chaotic and trend-dominated signals. To ask whether this is a genuinely quantum effect, we introduce a control rarely applied in quantum machine learning – a capacity-matched classical bottleneck with the same parameter budget – and find that it matches the PQC on the error metrics. The gain is therefore attributable to the low-rank value-projection bottleneck (an architectural parsimony principle), not to quantumness; adding further quantum layers only degrades performance and trainability. We accordingly position the quantum layer not as a source of accuracy advantage but as a competitive instantiation of this principle: its low-rank compression onto the signal's intrinsic dimensionality is matched by a classical bottleneck, so the gain is architectural rather than quantum.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17786

Toward Accessible Psychotherapy Training Using AI-Driven Interactive Patient Avatars

Authors:

Pascal Riachi ↗Sofie Kamber ↗Stella Brogna ↗Andrew Gloster ↗Rafael Wampfler ↗

Training psychotherapists in evidence-based interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) requires repeated practice with meaningful feedback, yet opportunities for safe, standardized training are limited by ethical, logistical, and resource constraints. We introduce a system designed to support ACT-oriented psychotherapy training through spoken dialogue with an embodied virtual patient. The system uses large language models to simulate patient behavior conditioned on profiles derived from real therapy sessions and configurable clinical scenarios, while a separate automated evaluator provides turn-by-turn feedback on therapist responses based on established ACT fidelity criteria. Rather than aiming to replace supervision, the system is intended to support deliberate practice by enabling experimentation, reflection, and immediate feedback in low-risk settings. Expert evaluation with practicing psychologists confirmed high realism in patient behavior and demonstrated that immediate turn-by-turn ACT feedback increased therapists' awareness of intervention choices and enabled effective experimentation with alternative responses. Quantitative evaluation across 49 therapy transcripts identified GPT-4o-mini as the optimal feedback model, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE = 6.12) in replicating human supervisor ACT fidelity ratings with statistically significant agreement. This work demonstrates the potential of fidelity-aware simulated patients as a scalable complement to psychotherapy training.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.02355

Mitigating Heterogeneity-Induced Drift in Hierarchical Sign-Based Federated Learning

Authors:

Amirreza Kazemi ↗Seyed Mohammad Azimi-Abarghouyi ↗Gabor Fodor ↗Carlo Fischione ↗

arXiv:2602.02355v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) is well suited for large-scale wireless and Internet of Things systems, where devices communicate with nearby edge servers before reaching the cloud. In these environments, uplink bandwidth and latency impose strict communication constraints, making aggressive gradient compression essential. One-bit sign-based stochastic gradient descent methods provide an attractive solution in flat federated settings, but their behavior in hierarchical edge–cloud architectures remains insufficiently understood, especially under inter-cluster data heterogeneity. To address this gap, we develop a sign-based HFL framework in which devices transmit binary stochastic-gradient signs to edge servers, edge servers apply majority voting, and the cloud periodically aggregates edge models. Our analysis reveals that inter-cluster heterogeneity induces a persistent bias term in the convergence bound, reflecting the drift of edge models toward local objectives. This term cannot be removed by increasing the number of training rounds or by tuning standard hyperparameters alone. We therefore propose $\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}$, a drift-corrected sign-based HFL algorithm in which devices apply a cloud-assisted gradient correction before taking the sign. We show that this pre-sign correction mitigates the non-vanishing heterogeneity-induced bias while preserving binary device–edge communication during the repeated local sign-update steps. Experiments under severe inter-cluster heterogeneity demonstrate that $\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}$ improves the stability and accuracy of sign-based HFL and achieves performance comparable to full-precision hierarchical SGD with substantially lower device–edge communication.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18857

Investigating Inductive Biases for Machine Learning Emulation of Sudden Stratospheric Warmings in Idealised Isca Simulations

Authors:

Oskar Bohn Lassen ↗Simon Driscoll ↗Stephen I. Thomson ↗Sebastian Schemm ↗Francisco C. Pereira ↗

arXiv:2606.18857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning emulators are increasingly used for weather prediction and have the potential to extend skill on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales by learning dynamically important sources of predictability. A key challenge is whether the models can exploit predictability anchors, such as stratospheric variability, that influence tropospheric circulation beyond short lead times. We test how architectural inductive bias affects emulation of sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) dynamics using paired idealised Isca simulations that differ only in an imposed wave-2 heating perturbation. Across convolutional, transformer, and graph-based architectures trained for one-step prediction, model differences are modest when the stratosphere is dynamically quiet but widen substantially when SSW-like variability is active. Our results identify explicit three-dimensional vertical coupling as a key inductive bias for machine-learning emulation of stratospheric dynamics. However, Eliassen-Palm flux diagnostics show that low forecast error does not guarantee physically faithful wave-mean-flow interaction, with coherent errors remaining in stratospheric wave-driving structure.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2506.18831

Adaptive Activation Steering for Efficient LLM Reasoning via Closed-Loop PID Control

Authors:

Aryasomayajula Ram Bharadwaj ↗

Reasoning LLMs trained with long chain-of-thought often overthink: they spend tokens on redundant reflection and transitions that inflate cost without improving accuracy. Static activation steering (e.g.\ SEAL) suppresses such content with a fixed vector, but applies the same strength regardless of how redundant the current chunk actually is. We describe PID-steering, a training-free, decoding-time method that modulates the steering strength with a PID controller driven by a lightweight chunk-level redundancy classifier. On a subset of GSM8K with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, the method improves accuracy from 85.7\% to 89.6\% (+3.9 pp) while cutting average output length from 1026 to 790 tokens ($-$23\%). We report it as a small-scale proof of concept rather than a benchmark result.

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09.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2312.01265

The optimal sub-Gaussian normalisation for randomised monotone functions

Authors:

Thomas Anton ↗Rabee Tourky ↗

arXiv:2312.01265v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $\mathcal{M}$ denote the class of randomised monotone functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with values in $[0,1]$, and let $U_{\mathcal{M}}\colon \mathbb{R}_+\to \mathbb{R}_+$ be the minimal function for which $$ \mathbb{P}\left\{ \sqrt{\eta_f}\, \sup_{t\in\mathbb{R}} \left| f_Z(t) - \Exf{f_Z(t)} \right| \ge \varepsilon\sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(\eta_f)} \right\} \le 2\e^{-2\varepsilon^2} $$ holds for every member $f_Z$ of $\mathcal{M}$ with finite effective sample size $\eta_f$ and every positive $\varepsilon$. We prove that for every $x> 1$, $$ \left| \sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(x)} - \sqrt{\log_4 x} \right| \le 2 \min\!\left\{ 1,\, \frac{2 \ln(\e + \ln x)}{\sqrt{\ln x}} \right\}\,. $$ The optimal adjustment $\sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(x)}$ matches $\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\ln 2}}\sqrt{\ln x}$ for all $x>1$, with residuals bounded as above.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.05779

How Controlling the Variance can Improve Training Stability of Sparsely Activated DNNs and CNNs

Authors:

Emily Dent ↗Jared Tanner ↗

arXiv:2602.05779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Edge-of-Chaos (EoC) theory developed for the random initialization of deep networks allows more efficient training by both preserving information in the initial outputs of the network and minimising exploding or vanishing gradients through characterisation of the intermediate layers as Gaussian processes. This EoC theory provides formulae for the choice of the initialisation distribution variances of the weights and biases. For activations which are approximately linear around the origin, the EoC theory typically encourages the Gaussian process variance to converge towards zero with increasing depth. Here we consider the less studied setting of highly sparsity inducing activations where a large region of values near the origin are set to zero. In this setting we prove a new phenomenon whereby initialisations leading to larger fixed Gaussian processes are beneficial to training stability. This theory informs a new, yet simple, initialisation strategy that allows training DNNs and CNNs with as large as 90\% sparsity in the hidden layers.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2507.16859

Enhancing Fatigue Detection through Heterogeneous Multi-Source Data Integration and Cross-Domain Modality Imputation

Authors:

Luobin Cui ↗Yanlai Wu ↗Tang Ying ↗Weikai Li ↗

arXiv:2507.16859v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fatigue detection for human operators is important in safety-related applications such as aviation, mining, and long-haul transport. Reliable estimation of operator fatigue can support timely warnings, adaptive task scheduling, takeover reminders, and other safety-management decisions in human-machine systems. However, the effectiveness of these functions depends on whether fatigue-related signals can be reliably captured in the deployment environment. While many studies have shown the value of high-fidelity sensors in controlled laboratory environments, their performance often degrades when used in real-world settings because of noise, lighting conditions, and field-of-view constraints, thereby limiting their practical use. This paper formalizes a deployment-oriented setting for real-world fatigue detection, where high-quality sensors are often unavailable in practical applications. To address this issue, we use knowledge from heterogeneous source domains, including high-fidelity sensors that are difficult to deploy in the field but commonly used in controlled environments, to assist fatigue detection in the real-world target domain. Based on this idea, we design a heterogeneous and multi-source fatigue-detection framework that uses the available modalities in the target domain while leveraging diverse configurations in the source domains through cross-domain modality imputation based on shared modalities.

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19292

Risk Stratification for ICU Delirium using Pervasive Ambient Sensing Information

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Delirium is a common and serious complication in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), associated with increased morbidity, prolonged hospital stays, and higher healthcare costs. Despite its prevalence, early prediction and prevention remain challenging. Environmental factors such as ambient sound and light may influence the onset of delirium, yet they are often overlooked in risk assessments. In this study, we examined whether light intensity and sound pressure levels can independently predict delirium across multiple prediction horizons. We evaluated four efficient sequential neural network models on data collected from 9 ICUs across 309 patients to predict delirium for 10 prediction-window sizes. We reported feature importance and direction of influence using Shapley Additive Explanations analysis. The convolutional model achieved the strongest discrimination, with AUC = 0.80 on sound data and on combined data. Sound features were the dominant predictors overall. Integrating sound with light improved short-term ($

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.01761

Position: Modular Memory is the Key to Continual Learning Agents

Authors:

arXiv:2603.01761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models have transformed machine learning through large-scale pretraining and increased test-time compute. Despite surpassing human performance in several domains, these models remain fundamentally limited in continuous operation, experience accumulation, and personalization, capabilities that are central to adaptive intelligence. While continual learning research has long targeted these goals, its historical focus on in-weight learning (IWL), i.e., updating a single model's parameters to absorb new knowledge, has rendered catastrophic forgetting a persistent challenge. Our position is that combining the strengths of In-Weight Learning (IWL) and the newly emerged capabilities of In-Context Learning (ICL) through the design of modular memory is the missing piece for continual adaptation at scale. We outline a conceptual framework for modular memory-centric architectures that leverage ICL for rapid adaptation and knowledge accumulation, and IWL for stable updates to model capabilities, charting a practical roadmap toward continually learning agents.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17092

Securing Multi-Agent GIS Systems: Risk Evaluation and Prompt Hardening Optimization

Authors:

Kyle Gao ↗Pranavi Kotta ↗Linlin Xu ↗Jonathan Li ↗David A. Clausi ↗

Agentic systems are increasingly integrated with geographic information systems (GIS), where multi-agent coordination enables complex conversational and spatial analysis but introduces security risks. This work presents a security-oriented framework for risk identification, evaluation, and mitigation in a multi-agent GIS system while maintaining adaptability to broader agentic architectures. We test the agentic system of a commercial geospatial partner while developing a modular state-machine-based orchestration framework that abstracts agent behavior into reusable components. We evaluate robustness using a red-teaming framework with an adaptive attacker LLM and a deterministic judge that produces binary outcomes with supporting rationales across multi-turn attacks. We further improve resilience with a prompt optimization framework that treats prompts as structured signatures and injects adversarial demonstrations, enabling systematic security improvements without degrading task performance.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2505.09655

DRA-GRPO: Your GRPO Needs to Know Diverse Reasoning Paths for Mathematical Reasoning

Authors:

Xiwen Chen ↗Wenhui Zhu ↗Peijie Qiu ↗Xuanzhao Dong ↗Hao Wang ↗Haiyu Wu ↗Huayu Li ↗Aristeidis Sotiras ↗Yalin Wang ↗Abolfazl Razi ↗

Post-training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning. However, standard GRPO relies on scalar correctness rewards that are often non-injective with respect to semantic content: distinct reasoning paths receive identical rewards. This leads to a Diversity-Quality Inconsistency, where the policy collapses into a narrow set of dominant modes while ignoring equally valid but structurally novel strategies. To bridge this gap, we propose Diversity-aware Reward Adjustment (DRA), a theoretically grounded framework that calibrates the reward signal using the semantic density of sampled groups. By leveraging Submodular Mutual Information (SMI), DRA implements an Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) mechanism that effectively de-biases the gradient estimation. This creates a repulsive force against redundancy, driving the policy to achieve better coverage of the high-reward landscape. Our method is plug-and-play and integrates seamlessly with GRPO variants. Empirical evaluations on five math benchmarks demonstrate that DRA-GRPO consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average accuracy of 58.2% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B with only 7,000 training samples and $55 cost, highlighting the critical role of diversity calibration in data-efficient alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/DRA-GRPO.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2511.17388

Selective Rotary Position Embedding

Authors:

Sajad Movahedi ↗Timur Carstensen ↗Arshia Afzal ↗Frank Hutter ↗Antonio Orvieto ↗Volkan Cevher ↗

Position information is essential for language modeling. In softmax transformers, Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) encode positions through fixed-angle rotations, while in linear transformers, order is handled via input-dependent (selective) gating that decays past key-value associations. Selectivity has generally been shown to improve language-related tasks. Inspired by this, we introduce Selective RoPE, an input-dependent rotary embedding mechanism, that generalizes RoPE, and enables rotation in arbitrary angles for both linear and softmax transformers. We show that softmax attention already performs a hidden form of these rotations on query-key pairs, uncovering an implicit positional structure. We further show that in state-space models and gated linear transformers, the real part manages forgetting while the imaginary part encodes positions through rotations. We validate our method by equipping gated transformers with Selective RoPE, demonstrating that its input-dependent rotations improve performance in language modeling and on difficult sequence tasks like copying, state tracking, and retrieval.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24828

Less is More: Quality-Aware Training Data Selection for Scientific Summarization

Authors:

Maria Nefeli Paraskevopoulou ↗Tatiana Passali ↗Grigorios Tsoumakas ↗

Scientific long-document summarization datasets commonly treat author-written abstracts as gold reference summaries, although their quality and alignment with the source article vary. At the same time, publicly available scientific summarization datasets remain limited in scale and structure for modern long-context models. In this work, we address both challenges by a) constructing and releasing one of the largest biomedical and life science datasets for long-document summarization, containing 1.88 million PMC articles, and b) analyzing the reference quality of author-written abstracts with source-grounded and model-based metrics. We show that author-written abstracts vary in their alignment with the full article and that these quality signals can guide training-data selection. Training on selected high-quality subsets outperforms random sampling at matched training sizes and can match or exceed larger random subsets on factuality-oriented metrics. Our findings suggest that reference quality is an important factor in scientific summarization and that quality-aware data selection can improve training efficiency.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13240

Towards More General Control of Diffusion Models Using Jeffrey Guidance

Authors:

Rapha\"el Razafindralambo ↗R\'emy Sun ↗Fr\'ed\'eric Precioso ↗Jes Frellsen ↗Pierre-Alexandre Mattei ↗

A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14327

I'm Sorry Driver, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That: Appraising the Safety of LLMs within Automotive Contexts

Authors:

Shaun Feakins ↗Ibrahim Habli ↗Kim Littler ↗Robert Palin ↗

arXiv:2606.14327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper appraises recent frameworks within AI development to integrate LLMs into control tasks in automotive contexts from the perspective of safety assurance. This work has built upon the rapid integration of LLMs across automotive settings. However, we find that at present, these frameworks face significant challenges, limiting their efficacy in real-time safety-critical contexts. Firstly, we consider conceptual challenges, including the fact that deployers are faced with a dual challenge, wherein they must assure a model which has been developed upstream, i.e. as general-purpose tools by the large AI labs, in a downstream context, i.e. into specific vehicle architectures. Secondly, we consider concrete challenges from across existing standards. We show that there are currently both fundamental engineering constraints covered in ISO21448, such as latency, and novel LLM-specific issues, such as alignment-related issues covered in ISO/PAS8800. We ground both examples in a concrete introductory, experimental case study exploring an existing open-source repository, Talk2Drive. We present a safety argument in order to make explicit the limitations of existing solutions. Nonetheless, given that the use of LLMs in automotive contexts is being explored at a technical level and operationalised, we propose potential assurance mechanisms for LLM-related hazardous events going forward.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.07489

How AI Agents Reshape Knowledge Work: Autonomy, Efficiency, and Scope

Authors:

Jeremy Yang ↗Kate Zyskowski ↗Noah Yonack ↗Jerry Ma ↗

arXiv:2606.07489v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier AI systems are bridging the gap between intelligence and utility by shifting from conversational assistants to autonomous agents that execute tasks end to end. Using production data from Perplexity's Search and Computer products, we study this transition by examining how AI agents accelerate and reshape knowledge work. Three key empirical findings emerge. First, using sessions with near-identical initial query pairs as natural experiments for the same underlying task attempted with both products, Computer performs 26 minutes of autonomous work per user session, versus 33 seconds for Search. Computer automates task decomposition and execution that Search users might otherwise manually orchestrate and implement. As a result, Computer shifts follow-up query distribution toward higher-order work such as verification and extension. Autonomy also increases execution quality, with per-query dissatisfaction rates 55% lower on Computer than on Search. Second, due to its autonomy advantage, Computer reduces completion time from 269 to 36 minutes on matched tasks, lowering estimated time and cost by 87% and 94%, respectively, compared to humans equipped with Search alone. Third, Computer changes the scope of work that users attempt: Computer queries more often cross occupational boundaries, require higher-order cognition, draw on broader expertise, take the form of composite tasks that bundle interdependent subtasks into a single query, and unlock work activities that are essentially absent from Search usage among the same users. Together, the evidence indicates that AI agents accelerate workflows, enhance output quality, reduce costs, and expand the breadth and depth of automated work.

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21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13260

Extracting Governing Equations from Latent Dynamics via Multi-View Contrastive Learning

Authors:

Paolo Muratore ↗Mackenzie Weygandt Mathis ↗

arXiv:2606.13260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying latent dynamical systems from noisy, high-dimensional measurements is a central problem at the intersection of representation learning, system identification, and scientific discovery. We present DYSCO, a multi-view temporal contrastive learning algorithm that jointly recovers latent trajectories and the governing dynamics from such observations, by leveraging multiple independent noisy views of the same underlying process to disentangle signal from noise. By parameterizing the dynamics in a structured functional basis, our framework further enables symbolic recovery of the governing equations within an affine gauge. We offer theoretical guarantees for strong identification up to an affine indeterminacy, extending prior identifiability results to the realistic setting of noisy nonlinear observations. Empirically, we demonstrate accurate recovery of both latent trajectories and flow fields across a diverse set of dynamical regimes (e.g., chaotic, oscillatory, and metastable) under both Gaussian and Poisson observation noise, the latter being particularly relevant for neural recordings.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18832

Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines: TRUST

Authors:

K. Darshana Abeyrathna ↗Sara El Mekkaoui ↗Nils Enric Canut Taugb{\o}l ↗Anuja Vats ↗

arXiv:2606.18832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Counterfactual explanations are widely used to provide algorithmic recourse in high-stakes decision-making systems. Most existing methods seek the smallest change to an input that flips a model's decision. However, decision-makers often rely not only on predicted labels but also on confidence thresholds and risk margins. Counterfactuals that barely cross a decision boundary can be fragile and unstable under noise or model variation. In this paper, we propose Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines (TRUST), a framework in which users explicitly specify the desired prediction confidence for recourse. Rather than generating counterfactuals and evaluating confidence afterward, TRUST directly searches for minimal changes that satisfy a user-defined confidence target, enabling comparison of recourse options in terms of cost, confidence, and robustness. We instantiate TRUST using a Probabilistic Tsetlin Machine (PTM) combined with Bayesian optimization. The probabilistic clause-based structure of PTM links prediction confidence to the stability of decision rules. We show that counterfactuals satisfying the same rules can still differ substantially in reliability depending on how securely they satisfy those rules, revealing whether decisions are supported by robust or fragile clause activations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that target-confidence counterfactuals produce more robust and interpretable recourse than conventional boundary-based approaches. Across multiple benchmarks, TRUST achieves perfect robustness while maintaining low recourse cost, including an L2 distance of 0.10 on the Haberman dataset at 0.92 confidence. By explicitly controlling confidence and exposing rule-level stability, TRUST provides actionable recourse for high-stakes decision support.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11816

WorldReasoner: Evaluating Whether Language Model Agents Forecast Events with Valid Reasoning

Authors:

Yizhou Chi ↗Eric Chamoun ↗Zifeng Ding ↗Andreas Vlachos ↗

Forecasting real-world events requires language-model agents to reason under uncertainty from incomplete, time-bounded information. Yet evaluating whether agents genuinely forecast requires more than final-answer accuracy: a model may be correct by recalling memorized training facts, citing fabricated evidence, or producing an unsupported causal story. We present WorldReasoner, an evaluation framework for temporally valid event forecasting. Each task gives an agent a resolved forecasting question, a simulated forecast date, and access only to evidence available before that date; after resolution, the framework scores the submitted probability, cited evidence, and optional causal event graph. WorldReasoner reports three complementary axes: outcome quality against resolved answers, evidence quality over cited sources, and reasoning quality against post-resolution hindsight graphs. The benchmark is built by an agentic construction pipeline that generates forecasting questions, collects time-stamped evidence, and builds hindsight reference graphs at scale, yielding 345 resolved tasks derived from 14,141 articles with graphs covering 8,087 extracted events. Across six controlled agent settings, temporally valid retrieval is the strongest driver of outcome accuracy; causal graph construction improves key-event recovery; and correct graph-enabled forecasts are more strongly grounded in key events and relevant sources, yet agents still struggle to convert grounded evidence into calibrated probabilities.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11846

SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining

Authors:

Hyeongyeol Lim ↗Hongjun Yoon ↗Eunjin Jang ↗Daeky Jeong ↗Won June Cho ↗Hwamin Lee ↗

Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schrödinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14961

CoRA: Confidence-Rationale Alignment for Reliable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Authors:

Juming Xiong ↗Weixin Liu ↗Kevin Guo ↗Congning Ni ↗Junchao Zhu ↗Chongyu Qu ↗Chao Yan ↗Katherine Brown ↗Avinash Baidya ↗Xiang Gao ↗Bradley Malin ↗Zhijun Yin ↗…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can improve LLM performance, but high answer confidence may be misleading when the accompanying CoT rationale is plausible yet incomplete or poorly supported. We study confidence–rationale alignment: whether a model's confidence in its committed answer is justified by its generated rationale. We introduce a GRPO-based reinforcement learning framework that jointly rewards answer correctness, committed-answer probability, and rubric-based rationale support, where the rubric assesses grounding, coherence, task match, and connection to the selected answer without revealing the gold answer to the judge. Across MedQA, MathQA, and OpenBookQA using three open-weight LLMs, our method reduces the confidence–rationale alignment error by up to 26.51% compared with untuned checkpoints, SFT, and correctness-only GRPO, while maintaining competitive accuracy and often improving calibration. These results show that reliable CoT reasoning requires not only confident answers, but rationales that substantively support them.

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